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Big Data v. Intuition: And The Tie Goes To…

Is there a lot of data coming out about patent troll litigation these days or what? Entire companies are built around the collection, analysis, and packaging of NPE litigation data so there’s clearly a market for it.

Reading this article from Wired about Big Data and what it does to the concept of a SME (which, when pronounced “smee”, is almost as much fun to say as “nastygram”), I’m struck by the balance of how much of the litigation data can be taken at face value v. how much of what we think about these guys is just pure personality driven. For example, I don’t care much for Nathan Myhrvold. The main reason is that he refuses to come out and say what he’s doing, even though we all know. You just want to walk up to him and say “We can see you, Karl. C’mon man, you’re the King of the Jungle! You’re better than this…” Besides which, he looks just like Daniel Hardman, the antagonist in USA Network’s brilliant legal show Suits. Strike two, if you’re counting.

The Big Data op-ed was online, but in the current print edition of Wired, there’s an article on page 24 entitled “What If Your Gut is (Gasp) Wrong?” I thought this was a particularly salient point, though I don’t necessarily find it applicable:

There’s so much information that it’s easy to build a case for what we wanted to do all along.

In the troll-o-sphere, I don’t think we can say that the data doesn’t point to the conclusion that there are companies out there extorting money for patents, from big and little guys alike. So it’s not like we’ve come to that conclusion and genned up data that matched it. But I think Colleen Chien is right, and it’s a point I’ve made as well, that litigation data does not, as her point #10 indicates, tell the whole story. The award for the sentence with the most commas goes to: IPTT.

I agree that Big Data can prove right over gut feelings. Though I haven’t seen it because it is not likely to make me laugh and does not star Harrison Ford, my two criteria for any movie I’m going to spend two hours of my life on, Moneyball evidently makes this point re: The Oakland A’s in 2002, who used pure statistics to drive player decisions and won the pennant. Having raw data and numbers in front of your face does lead to more informed decision-making. Point made.

But what if you can have both? What if you can take the raw numbers and then match that with gut feelings that have been data-fied? (When there’s not a word for what I want to say, I just make one up. That’s how I roll.) I think you can take the raw data about litigations and you can take raw data about what happens prior to litigation and you can take softer, more gut-level data about the personalities running the trolls (and the legal teams defending them) and you can paint a very nice picture of what needs to be done to solve the problem. By codifying relationships in the industry you can put those gut reactions into a form that can be queried back out.

What I’m saying is that I don’t think we’re getting all the data points we need. Start collecting the points you’re not catching now and put the screws to the data and see if you can come up with a different set of solutions to fight these guys than we have now.

I’ll end with one of my favorite quotes, and why I think Big Data v. Intuition ends in a tie:

You can lead a man to knowledge, but you can’t make him think.

Getting the data you need is only 1/2 the battle. What you do with it is the other 1/2.